Keydell Woodland Walk: Garden centre apologises for ticket chaos but says it is a 'worldwide issue' with ticket sales company

Keydell Nurseries in Horndean holds a hugely popular Woodland Walk each year, which includes children seeing Father Christmas and being given a present.

Tickets for this year’s events went on sale at 9am yesterday – but the website used by the garden centre to process sales crashed after the high demand.

Customers complained that when they got through the screen would go white and time out. This led them to try to rebook – thinking the attempt had failed – but later in the day they realised that they had been charged for each attempt, with some people reporting that up to £1,000 had been taken out of their bank accounts.

Keydell said immediately that it would refund customers and has been working through the backlog today and yesterday – up to 11pm.

A statement issued by Keydell said: ‘Please keep in mind we will have Facebook messages, Instagram messages, two emails and customers walking in to work through.

‘Refunds can take up to three to five working days but most customers have told us the payments have cleared whilst in discussion with us although we can not guarantee this as depends on your bank.

‘Please can you message any platforms you have used if your query has been dealt with so when we check the various contact methods we know it’s already been dealt with.

‘Lastly we truly apologise that this has happened. Usually in previous years it’s our company page that fails us with the impact, but this year we upgraded our company page so could take the demand for tickets. Our page was fine thankfully for this, we then use a company for our ticket sales, it had proven all working fine when we released our Halloween Tickets. We finally made contact with that company yesterday and the issue was worldwide. We are still waiting in discussion about the issues that are happening.

‘Thank you for being understanding.’

As well as messaging online, people can go into the store today to sort out refunds and dates, although the garden centre has warned there may be a queue and has asked customers to be patient with staff.